Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Dear Distracted Girl, (Epistolary Wednesday)

Dear Distracted Girl,

When you were little, I thought only your age was to blame
on your restlessness and forgetfulness. I’ve been waiting all these years for
you to grow out of “it”—an “it” I’ve had a hard time defining up until now.
It’s that thing that happens when I talk to you and you don’t seem to hear me
and I repeat myself and you don’t seem to hear me, again, as if you’re lost in
your head and daydreaming about video games or beading or the clay sculptures
you want to create as soon as you can get through your breakfast. Being inside
your head is a good thing. I like to live in mine as well. It’s where I start
the beginnings of essays and emails. It’s where I problem-solve financial and
relational challenges. So, I wasn’t truly worried back then because you were
pretty focused at school; you stayed on task; you told the disruptive kids
where they could go be disruptive if they got in your space. Your second-grade
teacher told me he wished he could discover the secret to your
focus-in-the-classroom combined with your wildness-on-the-playground, put it in
a book, and sell it. Imagine my relief.

But then third grade came around and
those stupid test scores caught me by surprise. Oh, I know, it was your first
year taking standardized tests and third graders shouldn’t be expected to have
the hang of those straightaway. But it was other little things too—like your
rushing through words without sounding them out and substituting something
nonsensical just so you could say you read them. And now, added to language, it
is the math—the mere mention or sight of a division sign and you lose yourself,
as if fractions and decimals and negative numbers and operational signs are
whirring inside the blender that is your head, just to torment you. And we sit
at the kitchen table for a good ten minutes some days, before I can even
convince you to calm down--before the tears are gone-for-the-moment--and lead
you through a path of reasoning that you, inevitably, find crooked and laden
with stumbling stones. It’s a big victory when you’re able to surmount those
stones and climb the path after me.

I spent so much time feeling frustrated, like maybe
you just didn’t want to do your homework or clean your room, like maybe you
were just prioritizing fun and friends and creativity over the “first things
first” that I’ve taught you since you were three. But I’m realizing now
that it’s not mostly laziness or disobedience, but that you likely don’t notice the mess, Sweet Thing. You think,
in all honesty, that you did clean
your room, that you did empty your
lunchbox—at least, it’s what you remember, or think you remember.

I don’t know how long this will go on, but I’m changing how
I parent you. No more series of requests presented all at once—because you will
remember the last one and forget the first two. On school mornings, I get your
breakfast ready for you now so it’s at your place at the table—because it would
take you half an hour to collect bread, jam, a knife and plate if you were
instructed to do so. And we’re going to see someone in a few weeks—someone who
might shed light for us on what’s happening inside that sparkling, thought-full
mind of yours.

But let me just say, for the record, that I love your mind.
I love your enthusiasm and your quick-to-burn excitement that does, inevitably
cause you to focus on what’s-most-important-to-you even when the things-that-are-important-to-me fall by the wayside. Look at how you gather all the kid-piano
books in the house and tap out songs you used to play in your lessons. Look how you’re teaching yourself "Ode to Joy" on the recorder, shuffling through the house like a marching-band-of-one. And last night, on your tenth birthday, I watched you in the audience at a choral concert, your eyes almost
weepy over the sweetness of the girls’ voices, your phone poised in mid-air so
you could record this little bit of auditory heaven for keeps. I could see you
up there someday. I know you’ll be up there someday, singing like there’s
nothing better than entering that kind of beauty. All in is what you are, Girl, to the things you care about the most.

"Dear Boy,is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

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About me...

I'm a mom to three girls, a wife, a pastor, and writer. I can't stop asking questions--about how we do life right here, right now where we are--at the intersection of hilarity and sorrow, irony and sobriety. I'm also the author of Dear Boy, a memoir of loss and grief and faith-hanging-on.